Gentoo adopts GNU/Hurd

[Rhetorica]

At long last there's a second Hurd distribution: Gentoo. During an April Fools post they announced that they were switching away from the Linux kernel because it was "too unstable;" the truth of the matter is that they intend to go forward with support for both systems.

https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/04/01/gentoo-hurd.html

The Hurd is still pretty far from complete from a modern perspective—it has only partial SMP support and the list of supported arches is rather grim. But sometimes shining a flashlight into dark corners is a good way to drive interest in them!

The Hurd is a distant cousin of Darwin, being based around a GPLed fork of the Mach microkernel. It was the 'original' open-source kernel project, pre-dating Linux. Its development history has languished in hell for almost 40 years due to mismanagement, scope creep, politics, and navel-gazing by its contributors, and suffered a severe setback in 2007 after a critique concluded it had several architectural weaknesses. The text of this report has become part of the OS design canon—in the popular mind the Hurd has replaced Multics as "that other system" that appears frequently in design discussion but nobody's ever actually seen or touched.